‘Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police’ by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis (Faber and Faber, 2013)

The gripping stories of a group of police spies – written by the award-winning investigative journalists who exposed the Mark Kennedy scandal – and the uncovering of forty years of state espionage.

This was an undercover operation so secret that some of our most senior police officers had no idea it existed. The job of the clandestine unit was to monitor British ‘subversives’ – environmental activists, anti-racist groups, animal rights campaigners. Police stole the identities of dead people to create fake passports, driving licences and bank accounts. They then went deep undercover for years…

This term (inspired by a screening of the film “Woman, Art, Revolution”) the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Lancaster created a hashtag #womantheory to encourage Twitter users to name the three women theorists who had most inspired them. This had an unprecedented response and continues to elicit new tweets.

We now have a Twitter account @womantheory – follow us and tweet your selection.

We ask you to tell us about why a particular woman theorist / thinker / writer matters to you: for example, how did you encounter their work? how did their work change the way you think about an issue? how do you use their ideas in your own work? It can be as long or as short as you like. 500 words would be great.

You can be anonymous if you’d prefer.

What is ‘WomanTheory’?

WomanTheory is a challenge to the predominance of ‘boy theory’ and male voices and knowledge in academia.

WomanTheory calls attention to the elision of women’s contribution to social theory and knowledge.